Indeed Brewing union could be sign of things to come as cannabis law kicks in

April 23, 2024 by

Indeed Brewing has a union label.

Workers at the taproom and production facility in northeast Minneapolis successfully formed a union last month after over two years of organizing with the Twin Cities hospitality union, UNITE HERE Local 17.

The new bargaining unit brings together 31 workers, an overwhelming majority of whom not only signed union cards, but added their mugshots to a photo petition that organizers delivered to brewery management April 1.

Ten days later, Indeed formally agreed to recognize the union.

Indeed is the second craft brewery in the Twin Cities where workers have formed a union. Fair State Brewing Cooperative granted its workers’ request for representation by Local 17 in 2020, and they settled a first contract in August 2021. The union also represents workers at Brother Justus distillery.

More organizing gains could be ahead for craft beverage workers, thanks to a pro-worker provision in Minnesota’s new cannabis law, passed by DFL lawmakers last year. It includes a labor peace requirement for companies seeking a license to produce cannabis or THC products – like the seltzers that have popped up in so many local taprooms, including Indeed’s, in recent years.

Local 17 organizer Anders Bloomquist, a former Fair State worker, said craft beverage makers that want to continue making their own products with THC will likely need to work with unions like UNITE HERE to prove that they meet the licensing requirement.

“We are anticipating that a fairly large number of employers who are producing THC beverages will be signing labor peace agreements to get their licensing,” Bloomquist said. “This will be a process that we’re excited for – to have those labor peace agreements and begin talking with the workers there about why they might want to join a union.

“We’re ready to help anyone in this industry who decides it’s time to make a real change.”

The victory at Indeed is the latest in a string of successful organizing campaigns for Local 17. Workers at seven Twin Cities venues operated by First Avenue formed a union last November, and workers in the Macalester College dining facility joined UNITE HERE in April.

“When workers see other workers stand up and make a real change in their life, it tells them it’s possible to make a change in their lives too,” Bloomquist said. “Lots of workers are deciding it’s time for something different.”

Indeed Brewing is located at 711 15th Ave. NE in Minneapolis. The venue offers a tap room, to-go sales, event spaces and an outdoor patio.

See a full list of union bars, restaurants, clubs, hotels and craft beverage spots at uniteherelocal17.org.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , ,

Macalester student workers launch public union drive: ‘It’s been exhilarating’

March 26, 2024 by

Macalester student workers signed a petition to join MUWU – the Macalester Undergraduate Workers’ Union – after organizers went public with the campaign in February. (photo submitted by MUWU)

After 14 months of internal organizing, student workers at Macalester College went public in February with their campaign to form a union on the St. Paul campus.

“There are pretty big problems with student employment that are not going to be addressed unless we have the legally protected means to do so that you only really get with a union,” sophomore Henna Schecter, a member of the organizing committee, said.

Student workers hope to bargain for better pay and assurances that they will get enough hours to maximize their financial-aid packages. They also said unionizing would create protected, respectful lines of communication with their supervisors – who may double as their teachers – on work-related concerns.

“We’re treated more as students than we are as workers,” Roxy, a sophomore who works in the campus center, said. “We’re expected to do the work that any employee would be expected to do, but we’re not given the same sort of respect that an employee of the school should be given.”

Roughly half of Macalester’s 2,000 students have work-study jobs on campus. Organizers are moving quickly to collect enough union cards to demonstrate majority support before the spring semester ends – and hundreds of potential members of the bargaining unit graduate.

In the interest of timing, the Macalester Undergraduate Workers’ Union – or “MUWU,” an acronym that, yes, served as inspiration for the union’s cattle-themed logo – sought a neutrality agreement from the school, and asked for voluntary recognition if they collect enough union cards to demonstrate a majority.

While Macalester pledged to maintain a neutral public stance toward the organizing drive, a spokesperson said the school would force an election before recognizing the union.

For organizers, the decision was disappointing.

“Macalester has always been very prominent when it comes to activism, and they’ve always been very good about having people feel comfortable in making their voices heard,” Schecter said. “We would love to see that continue in recognizing us as a union.”

A frenzied start

Despite the setback, Schecter and other supporters described a growing enthusiasm for the union on campus. Hundreds of student workers signed onto the campaign in the days following the public announcement, as organizers posted signs, chalked sidewalks and collected signatures in public spaces.

“I feel like people are being heard, and it always feels good to be heard,” junior Bontu Takele, a sports medicine and research assistant, said. “It’s been exhilarating.”

It’s also been a long time in the works.

Student workers at Macalester began organizing in the fall of 2022. Roxy, Schecter and a few other students were planning actions in solidarity with Macalester dining workers who were forming a union at the time, when someone floated the idea of a union of their own.

The group quietly expanded its outreach to student workers in different departments, seeking to identify common issues that collective bargaining might address.

Several student workers cited disparities in the expectations of different work-study jobs that pay the same wage. Students working in the dining hall or assisting the training staff during an early-morning football practice are paid the same amount – minimum wage – as workers in cushier jobs, like staffing an information desk in the library.

“People are working long shifts in hot conditions and making the same amount as people who are working like three hours a week in an office, doing their homework,” Schecter said.

Organizers also heard from workers that lack of respect could be an issue in some positions.

“It feels like straight-up verbal abuse at times, and we don’t really have an outlet to talk about it except for with each other because of fear of being heard and potentially getting fired,” Takele said. “Having a level of respect between employer and employee is what I would like, not a power imbalance.”

MUWU decided to go public its union drive after organizing meetings began drawing nearly 50 student workers. (photo submitted by MUWU)

Within months of forming an organizing committee, its meetings had grown from six workers to 20. When nearly 50 student workers tried to cram into a meeting space earlier this semester, organizers decided it was time to go public.

“Summer is going to be a huge momentum waster, so we decided it was best to keep the momentum going now,” Schechter said. “It feels like we are very much at the start of something. We don’t know where it’s going to go, and we have no real context for what’s going to happen. But it is really exciting.”

Seizing the moment

Undergraduate student worker unions are a relatively recent phenomenon, as the National Labor Relations Board waffled for years on the question of whether or not student workers were primarily students and, as a result, ineligible for collective bargaining.

In 2016 the board issued a ruling that affirmed student workers’ right to unionize, and it survived a challenge by Duke University last year. Thousands of student workers – mostly graduate, but some undergraduate students, too – have unionized since the 2016 ruling, with a big spike in organizing during the pandemic.

Worker-organizers at Macalester hope to join their ranks soon.

“This is the culmination of a long, long period of work,” Roxy said. “It’s really cool to see the solidarity and see people coming together, and I really think this can spark more organizing among undergrads.”

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , ,

Video game workers in Minnesota make history with union drive

March 22, 2024 by

Over 300 video game workers in Eden Prairie have joined together with colleagues in Texas and California to form the industry’s largest union, looking to protect their work-life balance in a trade notorious for its “crunch culture.”

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) announced March 8 that about 600 workers at Activision Central Quality Assurance, a division of the Activision Blizzard gaming company, had won voluntary union recognition from Microsoft, the firm’s parent company.

With 334 workers, the Eden Prairie site is Activision Central Quality Assurance’s largest location, and employees there had been trying to organize with CWA for about four years.

Two recent developments – a return-to-office order last November and a round of layoffs in January – kicked the union drive into high gear, organizing committee member Allen Junge said.

“The way management approached layoffs was terrifying,” Junge, a Quality Assurance (QA) functional tester, said. “We’d gotten an email to tell us that layoffs were happening, but nobody knew how many people or who would be laid off. And in the Zoom call, it seemed like even the director of QA didn’t know whether or not we were going to be laid off until we were on the call.

“It was an awful experience, and that got a lot of people motivated.”

Within weeks of the Jan. 26 layoffs, Activision Quality Assurance United (AQAU) had enough support to request recognition from Microsoft under the terms of its labor neutrality pact with the CWA, reached after the tech giant acquired Activision Blizzard in 2022.

Over 1,000 Microsoft video game workers now have CWA representation. They include quality assurance workers with ZeniMax studios, who unionized last year and have since reached groundbreaking agreements on subcontracting and use of artificial intelligence.

“Microsoft continues to keep its commitment to let workers decide for themselves whether they want a union,” CWA President Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement. “Time and again, other big companies in the industry have made the decision to undermine and attack their own employees when they join together to form a union. Microsoft’s choice will strengthen its corporate culture and ability to serve its customers and should serve as a model for the industry.”

In addition to job security and layoff procedures, AQAU members said they hope to bargain a first contract that raises pay, creates more opportunities for advancement and puts remote work back on the table.

Junge, who lives in Minneapolis and began working for Activision Blizzard after the COVID outbreak in 2020, said getting called into the Eden Prairie office in November amounted to a pay cut for him and many other workers, given the added transportation costs and travel time. The policy is particularly burdensome for workers with disabilities, he added.

“Like a lot of tech companies, they put a lot of talk into diversity-equity-and-inclusion efforts and supporting people with differing abilities and disabilities,” Junge said. “But they’ve taken away the thing that makes our job more accessible to those people.”

QA workers run fully built video games through a series of tests before they hit the market to find bugs or crashes. Companies often pitch the work “as a way to get your foot in the door in the video game industry,” Eden Prairie QA tester Kara Fannon said.

In reality, Junge said, the work is almost always confined to projects that don’t come with opportunities to learn new skills. “We’re isolated,” he said. “Everything we do has to be QA, and there’s not a lot of options elsewhere.”

“At best, we get the internal job posting before the public does,” Fannon added. “We’re ready to grow our careers here and believe that having a strong union contract will set workers and the company up for success.”

As for the “crunch culture” that has become synonymous with video game work, Junge said that’s already starting to change, as workers’ organizing efforts in recent years have brought the industry under greater scrutiny – and raised workers’ own expectations.

“There were some awful experiences that people had, like working 16-hour shifts into the night and having to come in again at the start of their regular shift,” Junge said. “A lot of people kind of saw through it, that it is actually pretty terrible.”

Having organized the industry’s largest union “feels pretty historic,” he added.

“I think we’ll be a good voice for change in not just the gaming industry, but in the tech industry as a whole.”

Members of AQAU-CWA who work in Eden Prairie will join Minneapolis-based CWA Local 7250.

– Michael Moore, Union Advocate editor

Filed Under: Organizing, Union Events Tagged With: , , , ,

With unanimous support, Public News Service staffers win union recognition

June 14, 2022 by

Three weeks after going public with their union, 16 employees of Public News Service (PNS) won voluntary recognition from management May 24 and will begin contract negotiations as members of the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild, TNG-CWA Local 37002.

“We’re thrilled that management [at Public News Service] has voluntarily recognized our union,” the Public News Service Union posted on Twitter. “We look forward to negotiating our first contract, and working with management to create a sustainable and equitable future for PNS.”

The nonprofit, member-supported news organization covers 37 states, providing content to over 10,000 media outlets. The new bargaining unit brings together journalists, editors, audio engineers, and outreach and membership specialists based in locations across the country.

Nadia Ramlagan, a producer from Louisville, Ky., said PNS’s far-flung newsroom complicated the organizing process when it began about a year ago. But it proved a satisfying challenge to overcome.

“We’ve all really forged these deep relationships with one another, despite working remotely,” Ramlagan said. “I feel like my work life has been enriched. No matter what happens with the bargaining process, it’s really been a game changer.”

Workers requested voluntary recognition of their union after a petition for representation drew unanimous support from eligible employees. By granting voluntary recognition, PNS bypassed the lengthy National Labor Relations Board election process.

“I respect and recognize PNS employees’ right to unionize,” PNS founder and CEO Lark Corbeil said in a public statement. “Journalists have a staggering responsibility, and every editorial decision is a choice. Together, we must continue to put forward a collective vision of a just and sustainable future, and journalists’ safety and well being is central to that mission.”

Guild members said their top priorities in bargaining a first contract with PNS will be equitable working conditions and a fairer pay scale. They also will look to negotiations as a way to improve the news outlet and ensure its future viability.

“This is a group of really passionate producers and journalists who all saw ways that we could make our workplace better,” Ramlagan said.

In the last decade, workers at over 200 media outlets have launched union drives, according to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Locally, workers at MinnPost won recognition of their union with the Guild a year ago, and Minnesota Public Radio News staff members organized with SAG-AFTRA in 2017.

Ramlagan said PNS employees “definitely see ourselves as part of that wave of newsroom, white-collar and nonprofit workers” seeking a voice on the job.

“I think we’re at a crossroads collectively where the state of journalism can run on a system of exploitation forever until it totally collapses, or we change our approach to our industry, so it continues to be viable and sustainable and to attract good people who are in the work for the right reasons,” she said.

Bargaining, like the organizing process, will be a learn-as-you-go experience for most members of the fledgling union. Ramlagan, who has been with PNS for over three years, admitted to “a very limited understanding” of what unions do until recently.

“Everybody seemed to be in the same boat as me in that the idea of having agency as an employee and having the power to change your workplace for the better hadn’t really occurred to me, individually,” she said. “We’ve had some producers who’ve worked for Public News Service for seven to 12 years and are the most supportive of this effort, but they hadn’t taken that action until now.”

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Minnesota organizing drive puts the ‘union’ back in ACLU

July 19, 2021 by

Minnesota employees are part of a wave of organizing activity across the U.S. that is putting the “union” back in the American Civil Liberties Union.

After a speedy organizing drive that took just two months, eligible staff at the ACLU of Minnesota won voluntary recognition from the 70-year-old civil rights organization July 2, five days after the union announced it had support from a “supermajority” of 11 eligible employees.

The same week, employees at two other state affiliates of the ACLU, Arizona and Illinois, announced union drives of their own. In all, employees of 12 state ACLUs have gone public with their unions.

“We’re the ACLU; we’re built for this,” staff attorney Isabella Nascimento said with a laugh. “We have community organizers who do this work on a day-to-day basis. So it was very easy to have conversations with our colleagues about organizing a union.”

Locally, ACLU-MN Staff United is affiliated with the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild, TNG-CWA Local 37002. Negotiations with the ACLU of Minnesota on a first contract have yet to begin.

In a statement, union members said they hope collective bargaining will “create organizational stability and transparency; promote pay equity; develop stronger support systems for staff; increase equity and inclusion within the organization and its leadership; and hold management accountable for implementing the organization’s external principles – including its commitment to organized labor – within the walls of their workplace.”

They also expressed solidarity with “the growing movement of non-profit workers” organizing for more stable, inclusive and equitable workplaces.

Since 2019, workers at no less than 17 nonprofit and advocacy organizations in the Twin Cities have organized new unions – a trend that picked up steam in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide reckoning on racial justice following the murder of George Floyd.

“Throughout these several months of uncertainty, the mission of the staff at the ACLU of Minnesota has remained unchanged: to hold government accountable when it harms people and bulldozes their civil rights and liberties,” ACLU-MN Staff United said. “The staff expects that the face the organization projects to the public will match its internal ethos. Our decision to unionize represents an internal accountability mechanism and the staff’s unwavering commitment toward the organization’s success.”

The bargaining unit is likely to grow as the ACLU of Minnesota fills multiple open positions, Nascimento said. She said the organization has roughly tripled in size in recent years, resulting in some “growing pains that it was becoming increasingly difficult to fix internally without speaking with a collective voice.”

The successful organizing drive also puts employees in a better position to influence the process of hiring a new executive director. The ACLU of Minnesota’s previous executive director resigned, as planned, June 30.

“We think it’s really important staff has a voice in choosing the successor,” Nascimento said. “We know what makes for a successful organization for us and for the personalities we have in the office.”

In the meantime, leadership’s decision to recognize and respect its employees’ choice to form a union is having a positive effect on workplace morale. Nascimento said union members were pleased to see the organization live up to its stated position that collective bargaining is fundamental to workers’ ability to exercise their rights of speech, assembly and petition.

“It went very quickly, very seamlessly and non-contentiously,” she said. “It’s very collegial, and the atmosphere at the office is really energetic. It’s a huge show from leadership that they really are pro-union.”

Follow ACLU-MN Staff United on Twitter @aclumn_united.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , ,

ILSR staff seek union to ‘internally reflect what we are externally organizing for’

July 19, 2021 by

[Update 7/21/21: Management has agreed to recognize the union, according to the ILSR Staff Union.]

Staff members at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance announced last week that they have formed a union, but leaders of the Minneapolis-based nonprofit have yet to act on workers’ request for voluntary recognition of their new bargaining unit.

Members of the ILSR Staff Union, an affiliate of Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) Local 12, sent a letter to the ILSR’s co-directors last Tuesday formally requesting voluntary recognition, which bypasses the lengthy union-election process governed by the National Labor Relations Board and, instead, allows workers to collect signed cards requesting union representation.

While the co-directors have acknowledged receiving the request, their only response as of last Friday was to say they are doing “their due diligence,” according to Jess Del Fiacco, a union activist who works as ILSR’s communications manager.

“We’re pretty disappointed,” Del Fiacco said. “Our organization is publicly very supportive of organized labor. I personally expected them to voluntarily recognize our union. But we’re still hopeful that we’ll get there.”

Workers have set up an online form for supporters to sign a letter calling on the co-directors, John Farrell and Stacy Mitchell, to move forward with voluntary recognition. Sign it here.

With offices in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Maine, as well as Minneapolis, the ILSR’s mission is to strengthen local economies and communities by fighting corporate control, making the organization a natural ally of organized labor.

The bargaining unit at ILSR would include 14 workers. They began discussing the idea of forming a union last summer, Del Fiacco said, with the organizing drive entering full swing by fall.

Since then, an overwhelming majority of eligible staff members have signed onto the union drive, according to organizers.

ILSR union members said they believe collective bargaining will give them more power to promote equity and transparency at the organization – and to advocate for their own well-being.

Del Fiacco said ILSR staff members face issues common in nonprofit workplaces, like pay disparities, unwritten rules and responsibilities stretching beyond employees’ job descriptions.

But she added: “We don’t see this as any kind of response to a terrible workplace or anything like that. I have nothing but respect for the leadership of the organization and the work we do. We’re excited to help build an organization that’s even stronger together.”

Union members are hopeful the ILSR co-directors – sooner or later – will see things the same way.

“We really want our workplace to reflect the values our organization has,” Del Fiacco said. “ILSR works for democratic institutions, and we think there’s no reason we shouldn’t internally reflect what we are externally organizing for.”

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , ,